Go to main conference web site:

http://futureofvr.ucsd.edu/

Latest Conference Information below:

Updated Presentation Program:

http://www.calit2.net/~jschulze/tmp/futureofvr/

Live Streaming:

We are live streaming the presentations in the auditorium to allow remote participation. The URLs for the video streams are:

Day 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc9SPApLu20

Day 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li8Z1XjEafo

The presentations will be recorded, the recordings will be made available after post-processing. Check back here a week or two after the conference.

Keynote Speakers:

Amir Rubin: Tuesday, 10:45am

Amir Rubin, Co-Founder and CEO of Sixense, is a pioneer and visionary in virtual reality and an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience building companies and developing products in the fields of VR, simulation, video games, and motion tracking. Sixense is shaped around Amir’s two fundamental tenets for virtual reality: (1) to deliver the best user experience, the technology should be transparent to the user, and (2) a platform’s success depends on its ability to enable application developers.

David Brin: Wednesday, 10:45am

David Brin, PhD “Our far-out future? The return of the Village” Virtuality may provide us with "godlike" powers of visualization. And yet, in many ways it will bring back many patterns of our ancestors. Bio: David Brin is a scientist, inventor, and New York Times bestselling author. With books translated into 25 languages, he has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. A film directed by Kevin Costner was based on David’s novel The Postman, with other works under option.  David’s science-fictional Uplift Saga explores genetic engineering of higher animals, like dolphins, to speak and join our civilization.  In EARTH and EXISTENCE he explores near future trends that may transform our world. As a scientist/futurist, David is seen frequently on television shows such as The ArchiTechs, Universe, and Life After People, with frequent appearances on PBS, BBC and NPR. He has consulted for original shows like Ascension, Seven Days and Century City. A patent-holding inventor, he is in-demand to speak about future trends, keynoting for IBM, Google, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Mauldin Group, and Casey Research, all the way to think tanks and public agencies. (http://www.davidbrin.com/speaker.html) With degrees from Caltech and the University of California-San Diego, Dr. Brin serves on advisory panels ranging from astronomy, NASA innovative concepts, nanotech, and SETI to national defense and technological ethics. His nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? explores the dangers of secrecy and loss of privacy in our modern world. It garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association. (http://www.davidbrin.com )

Conference Speakers:

	Andrew Allen, Ph.D. Programmer, researcher, artist UC San Diego
	Prof. Sheldon Brown UCSD Sheldon Brown holds the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in Digital Media and Learning. He is the Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and is UCSD Site Director of the NSF Sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR). He is the former Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) and is a Co-PI and founder of New Media Arts for the California Institute of Information Technology and Telecommunications (Calit2). In the Visual Arts Department his undergraduate teaching is in the Computing in the Arts area and with the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts major. His courses focus on the engagement of real-time computer graphics, media and electronic controls for installation works. At the graduate level, his teaching is across all disciplines. His artwork examines relationships between information and space, which manifest as public artworks, and installations that combine architectural settings with mediated and computer controlled elements. Recent projects include: The Scalable City an interactive game installation, 3D movie and other artifacts show at venues including the Shanghai MOCA, The Exploratorium, The National Academy of Science, Ars Electronica, and many others. StudioLab, 2003 installation at Image/Architecture, Florence Italy; Smoke and Mirrors, 2000-2002 an installation at the Fleet Science Museum, and a touring environment; Istoria, a series of sculptures; Mi Casa es Tu Casa/My House Is Your House, 1997 - 2000, a networked virtual reality installation between the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City and the Children's Museum of San Diego; In the Event, 1995, at the Seattle Center Key Arena, Seattle WA, 60ft. x 8 ft. x 2 ft., 28 video monitors, 9 computers, video disk, 3 live feeds, 70 cast aluminum panels; The Video Wind Chimes, 1994, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, four video projectors, electronic controls, aluminum, plastic; and Apparitions, 1994, a virtual reality environment, at the University Art Gallery at UCSD. Brown has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Science Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Hellman Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, AT&T Foundation, Intel Corporation, IBM, nVidia, Sony, Silicon Graphics Inc., Sony Corporation, and others. He has previously been on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kansas City Art Institute. His current work, Istoria, is a set of tableau sculptures, developed with visualization software he is developing through a residency at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University.
	Thomas A. DeFanti, Ph.D. Research Scientist Qualcomm Institute Thomas A. DeFanti is an internationally recognized pioneer in visualization and virtual reality technologies. As a leader in the development of next-generation networks to advance science, DeFanti has also overseen a multitude of innovations in the area of computer networks. DeFanti received a B.A. in Mathematics from Queens College in 1969, a M.S. in Computer Information Science from Ohio State University in 1970, and here three years later in 1973 a Ph.D. in Computer Information Science. He did his PhD work under Charles Csuri in the Computer Graphics Research Group. For his dissertation, he created the GRASS programming language. In 1973, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the next 20 years at the University, DeFanti has amassed a number of credits, including: use of EVL hardware and software for the computer animation produced for the Star Wars movie. With Daniel J. Sandin, he founded the Circle Graphics Habitat, now known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). DeFanti contributed greatly to the growth of the SIGGRAPH organization and conference. He served as Chair of the group from 1981 to 1985, co-organized early film and video presentations, which became the Electronic Theatre, and in 1979 started the SIGGRAPH Video Review, a video archive of computer graphics research. DeFanti is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received the 1988 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2000 SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award, and the UIC Inventor of the Year Award.
	Serafin Diaz, VP Engineering “Computer Vision at Qualcomm R&D”
	Prof. Margaret Dolinsky: Margaret Dolinsky is among the most notable artists creating Virtual Reality works in the final years of the twentieth century” [Jacqueline Ford Morie, PhD thesis 2008 SmartLab at the University of East London] Margaret Dolinsky paints the pixels of interactive art and 3D virtual environments by combining the visitors' face, voice and body movements to ignite installations and operatic moments. Her artwork begins with portraiture that expands over time, revealing colorful worlds of intimacy and wonder that use face-to-face confrontations to invoke memories and dreams. Dolinsky's focuses on how digital art provokes shifts in perception and enhances sensory awareness. Dolinsky has been creating interactive art experiences since her first CAVE piece in 1995 with exhibitions at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, ICC in Tokyo, and the Walker Art Center. She was commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art to create Cabinet of Dreams, a VR experience of Chinese antiquities. She has had several exhibits in China, including Emotable Portraits which uses facial detection and showcased at Supercomputing. Dolinsky produces digital projections for opera and experimental film. She designed interactive video for the American Opera Theater’s production Annunciation + Visitation: Operatic Projections of her sexual insight and has worked with the AOT’s director Timothy Nelson on several projects. Her augmented reality sculpture has been showcased in San Jose, San Francisco, New York, and Shanghai. She has created bio-art with Dr. Roger P. Hangarter, plant biologist, by manipulating chloroplast movements in live leaves in order to embed her imagery in their cellular structure. Their work together, along with musician John Gibson, garnered one of IU's first inaugural Collaborative Research Awards. Dolinsky's work is published in Leonardo, Discover, Computer Graphics World, US News and World Report and ACM's Computer Graphics. Lectures include Tsinghua University (China), Ciber@rts Bilboa (Spain), Sensorial Net (Brazil), BEAP (Australia), and ISEA (France, Albuquerque). She received a PhD from Plymouth University, UK and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Dolinsky is co-chair of the IS&T Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality conference. Margaret Dolinsky is Associate Professor and Area Head of Digital Art in the School of Art and Design and Senior Research Scientist in the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington.
\	Dr. Yoan Eynaud (Post-doctoral scholar) and Clinton Edwards (Staff biologist), Scripps Institution of Oceanography “Widening our view of the reef: How 3D reconstruction might change coral reef ecology" The use of virtual reality associated technologies in marine ecology is growing rapidly. The Sandin Lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is using 3D digital imaging to explore coral reef benthic dynamics across multiple gradients of local human impacts and environment factors. Indeed, understanding how marine organisms interact and compete for space on the ocean floor is essential if we want to preserve one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on earth. Using individual islands as replicates across the Pacific Ocean, we are tracking the fate of reefs over time. Thousands of individual high-resolution images of the reef floor are combined using Structure from Motion to form 3D and 2D mosaics. These biological maps provide an interactive view of the reef allowing us to track the fate of individual organisms at a landscape scale, and thus gain an explicit understanding of the rules that govern reef dynamics. In this presentation, we will describe how we use 3D and 2D reconstruction of the reef for both research and outreach purposes.
	Name: Stephen Guerin Title: CEO, Simtable Faculty, Santa Fe Institute CSSS Talk Title: Full Circle AR: coupling projected interactive surfaces to crowd-sourced reality capture Summary: Simtable develops interactive physical sandtables for emergency response leveraging agent-based models wildfire, flood, hazmat and traffic. I will discuss recent development efforts of our LiveTexture platform for crowd-sourced capture of animated point clouds of realtime events along with a live demonstration of the Simtable.
	Ed Helwig, Research Scientist/Developer at Livermore Software Technology Corporation. “Industry Potential for Virtual Reality Tomorrow” - Virtual Reality with Virtual Engineering as a future industry trend to enhance design and decision making.
	Jeffrey Johnson Jeffrey is a geospatial software engineer with 15+ years of experience building and delivering applications for the web. Jeff is a developer with a broad range of skills who can work at any level, from writing code and fixing bugs to managing complex projects and making architectural decisions while coordinating technical policy with corporate strategy. He spent several years working with international civil aviation authorities on early versions of AIXM an emerging standard for the interchange of aviation data developed jointly by FAA and Eurocontrol and NGA. Jeff is also deeply involved with the City of San Diego’s Open Data and Civic Technology initiatives. He is a graduate of Humboldt State University where he studied Geography, Cartography, Geology and Geospatial Technology.
	Prof. Falko Kuester Calit2 Professor for Visualisation and Virtual Reality Associate Professor, Department of Structural Engineering Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Director, Calit2 Center of Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality (GRAVITY) Director, Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California, San Diego Dr. Kuester received an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1994 and MS degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1995 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2001 he received his PhD from the University of California, Davis and currently is the Calit2 Professor for Visualization and Virtual Reality at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Kuester holds appointments as Associate Professor in the Departments of Structural Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering and serves as the director of the Calit2 Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality) and Director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).
	Prof. Thomas E. Levy Thomas Evan Levy is Distinguished Professor and holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Department of Anthropology and Judaic Studies Program, and leads the Cyber-archaeology research group at the Qualcomm Institute, California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Levy is a Levantine field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on social evolution from the beginnings of sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 7500 BCE) to the rise of the first historic Levantine state level societies in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 BCE). A Fellow of the Explorers Club, Levy won the 2011 Lowell Thomas Award for “Exploring the World’s Greatest Mysteries.” Levy has been the principal investigator of many interdisciplinary archaeological field projects in Israel and Jordan that have been funded by the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and other organizations. Tom also conducts ethnoarchaeological research in India. Levy, his wife Alina Levy and the Sthapathy traditional craftsmen from the village of Swamimalai co-authored the book Masters of Fire - Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India. Bochum: German Mining Museum, 2008). Tom has published 12 books and several hundred scholarly articles. Levy’s recent book is entitled Historical Biblical Archaeology – The New Pragmatism (London: Equinox Publishers, 2010 that in 2011won the ‘best scholarly book’ from Biblical Archaeology Society (Washington, DC). Levy and his colleague Mohammad Najjar won Biblical Archaeology Review’s ‘Best BAR Article’ for “Condemned to the Mines: Copper Production & Christian Persecution.” His most recent book is: Levy, T.E., M. Najjar, and E. Ben-Yosef, eds. 2014. New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, Southern Jordan - Surveys, Excavations and Research from the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP). Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press UCLA He is Co-PI on the NSF IGEERT $3.2 million grant entitled “Training, Research and Education in Engineering for Cultural Heritage Diagnostics (TEECH). Levy directs the UC San Diego Levantine and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory and is Associate Director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute – California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Tom was recently elected Chair of the Committee on Archaeological Policy (CAP) of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).
	Peter Otto is an expert in the language and aesthetics of musical and media expression, and also accomplished in advanced hardware/software design and engineering, including instrumentation and facilities design, systems and networking applications, and a wide array of media technology research and development areas. Classically trained in musical performance and composition, he completed his graduate work at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1984, and continued there on faculty for several years. His vitae includes long associations with seminal figures Morton Subotnick and Luciano Berio, as well as studies and collaborations with Pulitzer Prize winners Mel Powell and Roger Reynolds. He currently holds appointments at UCSD as Technology Director on the Faculty of Music and as Director of Research & Development in the Sonic Arts R&D group at UCSD's CalIT2, established in 2009. As an educator he is a founding faculty member and advisor to UCSD Music's highly regarded Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM), a program which has produced top performers in the nation's most advanced digital media industries and leading universities. As a hardware designer he invented the first digital audio workstation control surface (Waveframe's Contact MIDI Panel), designed the hardware-based spatial audio system TRAILS, and more recently designed audio systems for CalIT2 (StarCave, HiperWall and other systems). Audio and music facility credits include CalIT2's Spatial Audio Lab (Spatlab) and collaborative designs for CalIT2's Black Box and Digital Cinema Theatres, and new systems and studios at UCSD Music's new Prebys Music Center (Experimental Theatre and other systems). Other design work includes advanced research projects in high-definition multi-channel audio streaming and production systems, most notably for CineGrid, a networked ultra-high-definition digital cinema R&D consortium. Research sponsors and collaborators include SkySound (LucasArts), Qualcomm, Inc., Cisco, Meyer Sound Labs, National Institutes of Health, HMC Architects, CineGrid, Walt Disney Productions, NTT, Biamp, Google, Comhear, Kyocera, NASA, NSF, Cubic, Harman, DTS, and others. In software design, Otto has written software for diverse applications in multi-channel and spatial audio, including binaural and multi-channel sound design environments and utilities, and a variety of spatial audio imaging packages. An entrepreneur, he has founded two software companies and consulted for top tier firms in the private sector. His performance design work has been heard in major American, European and Asian venues such as Carnegie Hall, Juilliard, Los Angeles Philharmonic, SIGGRAPH, Theatre Olympics (Japan), The Holland Festival, Foundation Maecht (Fr.), Santa Cecilia (Italy), Barbican and Royal Albert Halls (London), Ars Electronica (Austria), and many others.
	Arnaud Paris, VR Supervisor for VideoStitch: Arnaud Paris worked as a director and stereographer on a variety of formats including documentaries, music videos, commercials and short films since 2007. He made the transition to virtual reality since 2014 as he started to tackle some of the challenges related to doing VR in 3D. Arnaud has also been teaching Virtual Reality at UCLA as part of the professional program since 2014 and focuses on the potential of VR as a new storytelling tool. Arnaud joined VideoStitch in 2015 as a VR consultant and has been specializing on their stereoscopic solutions and to promote their educational program. Arnaud’s talk will focus on the challenges of doing stereoscopic virtual reality and the new solutions from VideoStitch with Vahana3D.
	Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi Director, UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing Professor CSE Department ; affiliate in ECE University of California, San Diego News: I started here at the University of California, San Diego CSE@UCSD on Jul 1, 2014, moving from UC Berkeley. My goal is to build a world-leading graphics and vision group at UCSD. (See launch of new UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing with newspaper article at UT San Diego, UCSD TV Computing Primetime on Visual Computing and earlier UCSD News Release on my appointment).
	Patty Rangel Producer, VR Geek, Artist, Writer and Speaker
	Jason Riggs Founder / CEO at OSSIC Engineering leader with 20 years experience in loudspeaker & headphone R&D in both engineering and leadership roles. I enjoy creating innovative solutions to complex problems, and thinking outside the box. I excel at user-centered design innovation for audio products. I am passionate about building great audio products and companies.
	Jared Sandrew Chief Creative Officer @ Legend3D 2D to 3D / VR live-action
	Stuart W. Volkow Strategist,Venture DNA (www.VentureDNA.com) Instructor, UCLA Extension and The Office of Custom Programs Commercial Trends in VR and AR The convergence of affordable technologies is creating a new industry with diverse categories. 2016 is a tipping point year for mass awareness of VR experiences, the emergence of a viable consumer market, and practical educational and industrial applications. Market growth and acceptance will be slowed by conflicting standards, confusing hardware, and a shortage of quality content. After a long gestation period of over 20 years, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality has arrived as a sustainable consumer medium in a variety of forms.  The milestone sale of Occulus Rift to Facebook for $2 Billion (reportedly $400 M in cash) has set the stage. Technological improvements, including 4K lightweight displays, improvements in graphics and video processing chipsets, excellent micro-mechanical gyroscopic 3D tracking and odometry, low cost, high-fidelity depth cameras, and gesture control interfaces, have come together to create practical, affordable, immersive systems. Applications to immersive worlds and gaming are obvious starting points for appropriate titles. Virtual tourism, sports, journalism and immersive storytelling may become mainstream even faster than gaming. Industrial growth markets will include design, engineering, medicine, and field servicing of complex equipment.

Demonstrations in Atkinson Hall’s Black Box Theater:

Allen Yang, UC Berkeley: Various demonstrations from the Yang laboratory.

Amir Rubin, Sixense: STEM. Sixense’s new, modular wireless controller for entertainment and scientific visualization applications.

Ching Lee, UCSD: Perspective Puzzle, uses Oculus Rift and game pad for interaction.

David Nuernberger, UCSD: VR Rock Climbing. Uses Play Station and Oculus Rift to augment a real rock climbing experience with a fictitious environment.

Eric, VideoStitch: Live streaming of panoramic stereo video from a GoPro rig to an Oculus Rift.

Helen Situ, NextVR: High end panoramic 3D video viewed with the Samsung Gear VR.

John Mangan, UCSD: Virtual Reality demonstration from Prof. Kuester’s GRAVITY laboratory at UCSD.

James Strawson, UCSD: Virtual Reality demonstration from Prof. Kuester’s GRAVITY laboratory at UCSD.

Jonathan Lin, UCSD: Sorting Objects. Uses Oculus Rift, Leap Motion and Ring Mouse to move items from one place to another.

Michael Hess, UCSD: Virtual Reality demonstration from Prof. Kuester’s GRAVITY laboratory at UCSD.

Philip Weber, UCSD: CalVR. 3D models, stereo panoramas, point clouds and other data rendered with Prof. Schulze’s laboratory’s CalVR virtual reality engine.

Stephen Guerin, Simtable: Projections onto a sand pit allow augmented reality scientific visualization of terrain data and fire simulations.

Steven McCloskey, UCSD: Nano VR. Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra controlled by Unreal Engine improve understanding of phenomena in the nano world.

Saurabh Goyal, SDSU: A virtual exploration of the air quality in National City. Uses an Android phone with a Google Cardboard-style viewer for low cost visualization of information relevant to asthma patients.

Demonstrations at Nearby Venues:

StarCAVE at Atkinson Hall: 34 HD projectors generate a 360 degree surround VR image, driven by 18 high end graphics PCs networked with 10 Gbit/sec. Trish Stone will present various projects from the past few years. Presentation times: 12-2pm Tue+Wed only.

WAVE at SME building: 35 narrow bezel displays show passive stereo images driven by a cluster of 19 high end graphics PCs networked with 40 Gbit/sec. Christopher McFarland will present various projects from the past few years. Presentation times: 12-2pm Tue+Wed only.
Walking directions to the WAVE lab: leave Atkionson Hall towards the south, walk past the bear leaving it on your left hand side, bear slightly left at Warren Mall, cross the street, SME building is now on your right, swimming pools are on your left. Enter SME building through side door to the left of the main entrance. Door will be open.